StoryTR: Narrative-Centric Video Temporal Retrieval with Theory of Mind Reasoning

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission7237 Authors

Keywords: Video Temporal Retrieval, Video Understanding, Story Understanding

Abstract: Current video moment retrieval excels at action-centric tasks but struggles with narrative content. Models can see \textit{what is happening} but fail to reason \textit{why it matters}. This semantic gap stems from the lack of \textbf{Theory of Mind (ToM)}: the cognitive ability to infer implicit intentions, mental states, and narrative causality from surface-level observations. We introduce \textbf{StoryTR}, the first video moment retrieval benchmark requiring ToM reasoning, comprising 8.1k samples from narrative short-form videos (shorts/reels). These videos present an ideal testbed. Their high information density encodes meaning through subtle multimodal cues. For instance, a glance paired with a sigh carries entirely different semantics than the glance alone. Yet multimodal perception alone is insufficient; ToM is required to decode that a character ``smiling'' may actually be ``concealing hostility.'' To teach models this reasoning capability, we propose an \textbf{Agentic Data Pipeline} that generates training data with explicit three-tier ToM chains (intent decoding, narrative reasoning, boundary localization). Experiments reveal the severity of the reasoning gap: Gemini-3.0-Pro achieves only 0.53 Avg IoU on StoryTR. However, our 7B \textbf{Shorts-Moment} model, trained on ToM-guided data, improves +15.1\% relative IoU over baselines, demonstrating that \textit{narrative reasoning capability matters more than parameter scale}.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Multimodality and Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond

Research Area Keywords: video processing, cross-modal application

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment, Data resources

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 7237